7 ms·

This seems like such an ass-backwards approach. They're making oil and injecting it into the ground using and old oil well. Wouldnt it be way better to just pay

This seems like such an ass-backwards approach. They're making oil and injecting it into the ground using and old oil well. Wouldnt it be way better to just pay Saudi Arabia/Norway to NOT to pump this much oil out of the ground?

m3kw9 6y ago
Maybe they are already not pumping this much. Just discount it 20% from any number. It’s free carbon removal by your proposal. They’d fleece you if you offer that payment to them lol. You’d never be able to track it
yaacov 6y ago
The idea is to figure how to do this cheaply now so that in the future when we have abundant clean energy we can deploy it at scale
StavrosK 6y ago
How do you do that? Are you paying them to shut the pumps down for X hours? What if the rest of their demand remains constant? I don't see how this can possibly work.
capableweb 6y ago
I don't really know the subject, think it's called "Carbon sequestration"? Your "making oil and injecting it into the ground" made me curious, and it does seem like a grand simplification of what's happening.
kisamoto 6y ago
Yes, absolutely. These are not mutually exclusive events. We need to reduce our emissions and stop pumping oil out (develop clean alternatives). We need to remove the existing excess of emissions in our atmosphere to get down to more natural levels.
- evolve2k 6y ago
  Having someone actively put oil “back in the ground”, actually really helps the narrative and ongoingly highlights the hypocrisy you speak of. It’s a next step.
throwaway894345 6y ago
Or better yet, tax the daylights out of oil so oil producers don't have incentive to produce? But as others mentioned, we can also pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  If you (probably in this case "you" means some government) actually tax the daylights out of oil, then your population will riot, remove you from power and reverse the tax before it has had any meaningful impact. "Gilets jaunes" riots two years ago were caused in part by a relatively minor fuel tax increase. Actually taxing oil so much as to significantly reduce its consumption would be a huge impact on population and cause much larger resistance, probably violent.
  - wmf 6y ago
    It needs to be phased in over time and refunded as a dividend.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      People do not want dividends, they want to be able to travel on vacations and drive their own cars and live in big houses.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        Cars will increasingly become electric and power stations will increasingly become clean. The inconvenience will minimize. Anyway, i’m the united states it matters relatively little what ordinary people want, it matters what businesses want, which is presumably the biggest reason we don’t have a carbon tax or any other sensible environmental policy.
bishnu 6y ago
I feel like the covid pandemic has definitively answered the question "What's better, government policy and collective action, or a small well-capitalized group implementing a technological solution?" Efforts like this are the only way we make a dent in climate change.
juancampa 6y ago
I understand that the oil they are pumping in is not nearly as useful as the oil companies pump out
- pkrein 6y ago
  This. Equivalent CO₂, but bio-oil has 1/3 the energy content of crude oil.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Yeah so long as it is stable low energy per Carbon is a feature and not a bug. Not only is it less dangerous for energetic reasons but it means producing it is more energy efficient. That is a weird sort of anti-symmetry. If we burn novel carbon fuel it is better to burn energy dense ones (natural gas vs coal) but if we want to sequester it the filthiest fuel for the energy is best in the situation.
graeme 6y ago
This is in fact the central idiocy of oil burning: we will have to put it back into the ground, at great cost. However there is no good way to buy the rights to permanent sequestration of a given oil resource. It would, however, be optimal to tax oil burning from stored reserves.
oh_sigh 6y ago
No, because the oil isn't fungible. We're getting high quality, grade-A organic, family-owned oil out of the ground and putting the bottom of the barrel sludge back in.
theptip 6y ago
TFA discusses this a bit: > Conscious consumers and companies are moving towards engineered carbon removals after carbon registries, verification bodies and trusted brands have sold fraudulent carbon offsets with abandon. Research from Oxford, Stanford and Berkeley has found that 85% of nature-based carbon offsets sold today are not “additional”, meaning nothing happens as a result of the carbon offset purchase. This has triggered a momentous shift towards permanent removals beginning in 2019 with Stripe’s landmark carbon removal RFP, followed by Shopify’s later in 2019 and then Microsoft’s in 2020.

m3kw9 6y ago

Maybe they are already not pumping this much. Just discount it 20% from any number. It’s free carbon removal by your proposal. They’d fleece you if you offer that payment to them lol. You’d never be able to track it

yaacov 6y ago

The idea is to figure how to do this cheaply now so that in the future when we have abundant clean energy we can deploy it at scale

StavrosK 6y ago

How do you do that? Are you paying them to shut the pumps down for X hours? What if the rest of their demand remains constant? I don't see how this can possibly work.

capableweb 6y ago

I don't really know the subject, think it's called "Carbon sequestration"? Your "making oil and injecting it into the ground" made me curious, and it does seem like a grand simplification of what's happening.

kisamoto 6y ago

Yes, absolutely. These are not mutually exclusive events. We need to reduce our emissions and stop pumping oil out (develop clean alternatives). We need to remove the existing excess of emissions in our atmosphere to get down to more natural levels.

evolve2k 6y ago
Having someone actively put oil “back in the ground”, actually really helps the narrative and ongoingly highlights the hypocrisy you speak of. It’s a next step.

throwaway894345 6y ago

Or better yet, tax the daylights out of oil so oil producers don't have incentive to produce? But as others mentioned, we can also pull carbon out of the atmosphere.

PeterisP 6y ago
If you (probably in this case "you" means some government) actually tax the daylights out of oil, then your population will riot, remove you from power and reverse the tax before it has had any meaningful impact. "Gilets jaunes" riots two years ago were caused in part by a relatively minor fuel tax increase. Actually taxing oil so much as to significantly reduce its consumption would be a huge impact on population and cause much larger resistance, probably violent.
- wmf 6y ago
  It needs to be phased in over time and refunded as a dividend.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    People do not want dividends, they want to be able to travel on vacations and drive their own cars and live in big houses.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      Cars will increasingly become electric and power stations will increasingly become clean. The inconvenience will minimize. Anyway, i’m the united states it matters relatively little what ordinary people want, it matters what businesses want, which is presumably the biggest reason we don’t have a carbon tax or any other sensible environmental policy.

bishnu 6y ago

I feel like the covid pandemic has definitively answered the question "What's better, government policy and collective action, or a small well-capitalized group implementing a technological solution?" Efforts like this are the only way we make a dent in climate change.

juancampa 6y ago

I understand that the oil they are pumping in is not nearly as useful as the oil companies pump out

pkrein 6y ago
This. Equivalent CO₂, but bio-oil has 1/3 the energy content of crude oil.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Yeah so long as it is stable low energy per Carbon is a feature and not a bug. Not only is it less dangerous for energetic reasons but it means producing it is more energy efficient. That is a weird sort of anti-symmetry. If we burn novel carbon fuel it is better to burn energy dense ones (natural gas vs coal) but if we want to sequester it the filthiest fuel for the energy is best in the situation.

graeme 6y ago

This is in fact the central idiocy of oil burning: we will have to put it back into the ground, at great cost. However there is no good way to buy the rights to permanent sequestration of a given oil resource. It would, however, be optimal to tax oil burning from stored reserves.

oh_sigh 6y ago

No, because the oil isn't fungible. We're getting high quality, grade-A organic, family-owned oil out of the ground and putting the bottom of the barrel sludge back in.

theptip 6y ago

TFA discusses this a bit: > Conscious consumers and companies are moving towards engineered carbon removals after carbon registries, verification bodies and trusted brands have sold fraudulent carbon offsets with abandon. Research from Oxford, Stanford and Berkeley has found that 85% of nature-based carbon offsets sold today are not “additional”, meaning nothing happens as a result of the carbon offset purchase. This has triggered a momentous shift towards permanent removals beginning in 2019 with Stripe’s landmark carbon removal RFP, followed by Shopify’s later in 2019 and then Microsoft’s in 2020.